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| Religious volunteers evacuate a body from the site of a bus bombing in Jerusalem June 18. A Palestinian detonated a nail-packed bomb aboard the bus carrying students and workers, killing at least 20 and injuring 55. |
Posted on 06/25/2002 9:19:33 AM PDT by tdadams
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"How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy. How beautiful it is to kill and to be killed — not to love death, but to struggle for life, to kill and be killed for the lives of the coming generation."
TWENTY-TWO-YEAR- OLD Mohammed al-Ghoul, a master's student in Islamic studies, wrote those lines. Then he went out and blew up a crowded bus in Jerusalem.
Twenty dead, including the homicide bomber. At least 55 wounded. The most deadly terrorist attack in the Holy City in six years.
It was not a thing of beauty.
This is what happens when a conventional bomb — garden-variety, garage-made — is exploded in a contained space, such as a city bus:
The explosive material packed around the device, Semtex or dynamite, say, releases an eruption of energy that heats up the contents of the bomb — in this case, a quiver of nails. In the blink of an explosive flash, the nails are pushed outward on a pressure wave that cannot be contained within the puny confines of a steel bus. Think of water boiling in a lidded pot. The lid will not hold.
This super-hot air will melt and warp everything in the immediate vicinity. It will turn the metal framework of a bus into instant shrapnel, over and above the shrapnel (the nails) fitted into the bomb itself. Now the bus becomes a killing instrument of metal and glass and fire.
The force of the blast is determined by the quantity of the explosive. An average bomb — the kind strapped around a suicide terrorist's waist, covered by a shirt — would likely detonate at a rate of about 28,000 feet per second — or about 22 times faster than a 9 mm bullet leaving the muzzle of a handgun. That means that the surrounding air pressure — normally 15 pounds per square inch — would spike to 2,200 pounds per square inch. Such heat and pressure will melt iron.
A person sitting nearby would feel, momentarily, a shock wave slamming into his or her body, with an "overpressure" of 300,000 pounds. Such a blast would crush the chest, rupture liver, spleen, heart and lungs, melt eyes, pull organs away from surrounding tissue, separate hands from arms and feet from legs. Bodies would fly through the air or be impaled on the jagged edges of crumpled metal and broken glass.
"For the exposed part of the body, the side facing the blast, it would be like falling off a building," says Dr. Pekka Sinervo, a physics professor at the University of Toronto. "No, actually it would be worse."
"Think of a hurricane," adds Constable Ken Evans, a bomb squad specialist with Toronto police. "All that wind moving at, what, 100 miles an hour? Air pushed by a bomb blast could be going at 25,000 feet a second. If you're standing close, it will blow your organs off the bone structure."
If you're the suicide bomber, if you're Mohammed al-Ghoul, you would feel... nothing.
"Vaporized," says Evans.
Except for knowing that you were about to die — unlike your victims, the children on their way to school, the secretaries on the way to the office, the shoppers who rely on public transport — I fail to see the courage required in such an act of destruction. It is a coward's death.
Suicide bombers, homicide bombers, they are the instruments of cowardly terrorist organizations, proxy murderers who pick off Jewish children and women, young mothers, old grandparents, teenagers at a pizzeria, twenty-somethings at a disco, entire families sitting down to a Passover dinner at a banquet hall, shoppers squeezing melons at an outdoor market, bus riders: shredded Israelis.
Hamas, an extremist Islamic group, took "credit" for yesterday's bombing. U.S. President George W. Bush was quick to condemn to the attack, as will most Western leaders, perhaps even our own foreign affairs minister, Bill Graham, with his palpably pro-Palestinian sentiments.
But Bush, Graham, all those Western leaders, including European presidents and prime ministers keen to appease their own Muslim constituencies, don't have to live in Israel, where buses kill. They don't have to send their children to schools patrolled by soldiers. They needn't worry that a beloved teenage daughter, out for the evening with friends, will have her minced remains scraped off the sidewalk by volunteer crews that immediately descend on every explosion site, scouring for body bits — because this is not debris, not effluent. These are the precious remains of human beings, and all their families might get to bury.
This is the beautiful spectre imagined by al-Ghoul? An educated Palestinian, resident of the Al Faraa refugee camp, a devout Muslim, a man of the Koran, blinded by the zealotry of Hamas, which had recruited him as one more human bomb. They won't do the killing on their own, the Hamas leadership. Why sacrifice themselves when there is so much human fodder at their disposal, all those hate-poisoned martyrs, little more than boys and girls, impoverished more inside their souls than in the outward manifestation of their lives.
Al-Ghoul — how appropriate, that name! — had twice before failed to stage suicide attacks, according to the note he left behind, although he didn't explain how or why he had been previously thwarted. Had he been repulsed by security, by the Israeli military, by checkpoints? Or had he lost his nerve?
If only more of them would lose their nerve.
"This time, I hope I will be able to do it," he'd written in his farewell missive, this after paying one last weekend visit to relatives, including thee sisters to whom he'd brought sweets. When he took his leave, the sisters assumed their brother was returning to An-Najah University in nearby Nablus, where he was preparing for exams. But why bother to study, why embark on a new life when you can choose death instead, for yourself, for umpteen strangers.
What can Israel do now? Retaliate, no doubt. And vengeance is theirs. Continue building their 360-kilometre security fence to wall off Palestinians on the West Bank from Israel proper. Support, as a besieged nation, even more punitive actions against the Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank, even more humiliating rules that circumscribe normal movement.
Yes, to all that, if with heavy heart. Because to do otherwise, to placate the devastators, would be to reward Hamas and their kin.
These are not, I have come to believe in recent months, people who deserve a state.
Their independent Palestine would be a rogue nation, a failed state from infancy, a grotesquery from inception. I did not used to think this. The homicide bombers, and the families who celebrate them as martyrs beloved by God, have convinced me of it.
It was Kamel Irikat, an inspector in the Palestine police force and first generation Mufti terrorist, to whom history gives the dubious distinction of being the first Arab who vowed to "throw the Jews into the sea," this after the United Nations voted in favour of partitioning Palestine in 1947.
If not throwing them into the sea, then shrapnel-bombing them, one by one.
| Additional articles by Rosie DiManno |
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That's ok...he's got all eternity to suffer.
There is practically no industry, no farming, no resources, no anything in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The people mostly just commute to Israel to work. Ironically, Israel was born out of precisely the same total lack of resources, yet has developed into an industrial oasis remarkably productive for its diminutive size. If the Israelies can create such productivity out of a dead land, then the Palestinians* should be able to do the same if only they chose to - and apparently they choose not to.
Does Arafat & pals REALLY want a Palestinian state? Can they REALLY operate as an independent nation? Say Israel agrees and spins off the occupied areas as a new nation, sets up a secured border, only lets in these new foriegners with proper visas and comprehensive searches, and leaves all the new nation to provide its own security: a poor people with practically no industry, no farms, no ports, and no money.
Raise the question loudly and frequently: how could a Palestinian state survive as a soveriegn & independent entity? Answer: it cannot. Perhaps the fastest way for Israel to solve the issue of Palestinian terrorists is to give them what they want. "Give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves."
(* - yes, I realize some of these terms are not used precisely. You know what I mean.)
That paper has a strongly liberal editorial stance. Indeed, it can be considered as the house organ for the Liberal Party.
Indeed!
Main Entry: ghoul
Etymology: Arabic ghul
1 : an evil being that feeds on corpses
A ghoul was originally a demon of the desert from Muslim folklore. It is an evil spirit that feeds on the flesh of the dead or on young children.
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